A simple guide to Bitcoin

Bitcoin records every single transaction on its network in a public record called the blockchain. A new one is generated roughly every ten minutes and shared throughout the network. The determining factor in whether the blockchain is the real one or should be discarded as a fake is whichever is accepted by the most number of mining nodes. If someone is able to take over enough nodes that they could dictate their own, fake, version of the blockchain, they could then counterfeit bitcoins or spend them multiple times. Currently the biggest Bitcoin miner only has 15 percent of the total hashing power, but if this rose to 51 percent it could be disastrous for the cryptocurrency. Those concerned about this risk might want to move to